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Obama: History in the making, first black nominee
DENVER (AP) — When this campaign ends, after future presidents have come and gone, and when today's young people are grown old, history will remember Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, as the day a black man became the presidential nominee of a major party.
This is history with the ink still wet; transcendent, yet in your face now.
It's a history that belongs to the red states and the blue states and the United States, to borrow the phrase that made people first sit up and listen to Barack Obama only four years ago.
Americans who don't like him, who will never vote for him, own it, too.
The roll call of states Wednesday night at the Democratic convention means Denver joins Springfield, Ill., and Washington, D.C. in an arc that spans centuries which saw slavery, emancipation, lynchings, Jim Crow, lunch counter bigotry, voting rights, integration, oratory, intermarriage, black pride, assassination, riots, marches — so many marches — and now a nomination.
The arc traces Abraham Lincoln's legacy of freeing the slaves to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago Thursday, to the convention center in Denver.
And on next to Invesco Field, where Obama will speak on the anniversary of King's "I have a dream" speech.
"This is a monumental moment in our nation's history," Martin Luther King III, the civil rights icon's oldest son, told AP on Wednesday. "And it becomes obviously an even greater moment in November if he's elected."...(Click here for remainder of article).
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